How important is your leadership team's support of the performance management system in your organization? Sibson Consulting's 2010 study into the attitudes of human resources professionals towards their appraisal system sheds some interesting light on the value of top level endorsement.

The annual performance appraisal is an opportunity to enhance employee performance and create greater success for the company and the individual. In this article, Donna Price explores how coaching skills can be used in creating a good performance appraisal experience for both the employee and the supervisor and how to keep good performance going throughout the year.

How effective are organizations at driving superior performance from their employees? If we are to believe human resources professionals, the answer is that our performance management systems are failing to make the grade. This is the sobering conclusion from Sibson Consulting's worldwide survey.

Employee performance appraisals have come in for much criticism, and managers continue to have a love-hate relationship with them. What is interesting is that the different schools of thought regarding the measurement of people are tied to very different worldviews, or belief systems. And this affects the success rate of different approaches to performance appraisal in different organisations.

The most effective tool in a manager's toolkit for dealing with poor performance is coaching. Not screaming at them from the stands and withholding rewards but working with them down on the pitch to find out what's causing the problem and building their fitness and stamina like the corporate athletes they should be.

Mapping your organization's key processes not only makes good business sense. It is a sure-fire method for laying the foundations for a motivated and productive workforce. Leslie Allan shows you how you can use process mapping to engage your employees and why this method works so effectively.

The question asked by executives and managers – "How can I motivate my employees?" – is sometimes difficult to answer. Since each employee is motivated by a variety of different incentives, you need to find out what is of value for each person. Without doing a lot of research, here are seven ways that you can easily boost your employees' morale.

Face the facts: Creating a new performance appraisal system is a difficult undertaking. It's even more difficult if the organization doesn't have a logical, well-tested, step-by-step process to follow in developing their new procedure.

Especially when they are new to the business, people see their position in the company as fragile. They often need signs other than formal appraisals and skills inventories to help them to feel accepted and appreciated.

Too often, participants in performance appraisal meetings seem awkward and uncomfortable. To some extent, that's unavoidable – it's always a bit awkward for one person to deliver a formal assessment of the quality of work performed by another.

Possibly, the greatest untapped resource in any organization lies in its employees. These days, "giving 100 percent" is not enough to get ahead; you need to become more effective in unlocking your staff's potential strengths, creativity, and resourcefulness. Follow these seven tips in bringing the leader and his or her staff to their full potential.

Like most managers, Brian Reynolds believed that his team had its strengths and its weaknesses. When asked in an employee satisfaction survey "Do you recognize good performance in your team?" he answered with a resounding "Of course I do!" However the following question stumped him. "How frequently do you make a point of recognizing good performance face-to-face?" His answer had to be "Never".

Louise Erdmann felt like Gwyneth Paltrow at the Oscar ceremony. She had only been with her current company for a few months but here she stood, at the Christmas Party, receiving a reward for being the "Best Newcomer of the Year" and fighting back the tears. The awards were partly serious and mostly light-hearted but, for some reason, it meant a lot more than getting a 2+ in your appraisal.

What's an organization to do when all of its honest and genuine efforts to motivate Sally and Sam to come to work on time, work safely, deliver efficient services, and act as if they were happy to be a part of the team, fail? There is no shortage of pop-psych books and motivational speakers who'll tell you a thousand-and-one ways to light a fire in Sam's belly. But what do you do when the fire goes out and none of those thousand-and-one ways seem to work any more?

The role of money as a motivator is indisputable if you don't have enough. With bills to pay and mouths to feed, most hunter/gatherers will push themselves to get enough money into the bank account to remove those troublesome worries. However, once the threshold of comfort has been reached and there is a steady flow of money coming from a job that is well understood, can money be used as a further motivator?

In his job as an accountant, Anthony Stirling felt that the monetary rewards for his job were as good as he could expect. What he found difficult to understand was the feeling of lack of worth that turning up every Monday morning gave him. The office was highly efficient but people very rarely seemed to have time to talk to each other and his boss was a distant figure who barely knew his name.

Unless an organization's reward and recognition system is well designed, the system is potentially doomed to be a management plaything with no effect on performance and motivation, or it will become an officially sanctioned method to extort money from the business.

When it comes to employee engagement and commitment to an organization, most companies would agree that they 'have some, want more.' Why? This article offers suggestions to help get you started in moving the needle on employee engagement and commitment.

Sometimes the quiet achievers are up there with the best performers. Are you recognizing those people who get their job done efficiently and without a fuss? Or are you simply listening to those workers that make the most noise?

Incentive plans should not result in arbitrary distributions of money casually decided upon by senior management. Instead, a good incentive plan must be quantified, must be a predictable result to the employee and must be directly related to measurable performance beyond the norm. This differentiates incentive plans from savings or retirement plans.

The 1980's business culture in the USA and internationally put a considerable emphasis on personal reward on the basis that highly motivated individuals could transform organisations and societies. The extreme example in film was Gordon Gekko in Wall Street stating that greed was good. The 90's, however, have seen companies traumatised and bankrupted by the inappropriate use of remuneration as a motivator.

When is it more important to recognize the efforts of an entire team more than any of the individuals in that team? It is important to consider that even within a team you may not only be looking to reward their ability to produce good solutions.

Note: Business Performance Pty Ltd actively encourages the sharing of information. However, the opinions expressed in the submissions below are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of Business Performance Pty Ltd.